The World: Where Serbia Fits; Rebuilding Is Hard Without the Keystone

By ALISON SMALE

Published: June 20, 1999

AS the fighting raged in Kosovo, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and other leaders cast the latest Balkan battle as a moral imperative on the order of fighting Nazism. Much less forcefully stated was another goal: creating a Europe whole and free. Then Mr. Clinton, in his speech marking the end of bombing, invited Serbia to join what he termed ''this historic journey to a peaceful, democratic and united Europe.'' But he insisted Serbia would get nothing but the most basic humanitarian aid unless its leader, Slobodan Milosevic, goes.

So NATO's military might has proved, in the end, able to realize one alliance goal: the return of the Kosovo Albanians forced out by Serbian terror and the sheer violence that followed the alliance's decision to bomb. But it left its other goal -- the rebuilding of the Balkans -- very much open to question. In large part, that is because, barring the sudden disappearance of Mr. Milosevic, the West is proposing to rebuild the area without rebuilding Serbia, the country at the Balkans' heart.

Last week, as NATO's troops took control of Kosovo, they were finding more evidence of the kind of atrocities widely associated with Serbian security forces. Those horrors had already earned Mr. Milosevic and some of his closest cohorts indictments from the international war crimes tribunal. Confirmation of the murder and brutality described by Kosovo's fleeing Albanians seems certain to isolate Serbia even further.

The moral satisfaction of doing no business with Mr. Milosevic may wind up conflicting with the political and economic logic of finally bringing the Balkans fully into the new Europe, a costly and long-term enterprise.

The problem is that Europe does not need the Balkans to prosper, but cannot truly be at peace unless the Balkan states prosper too. For a century, these lands, haphazardly formed from the collapse of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, have been of interest to the rest of Europe only when fresh imperial ambitions made this expedient.

Now, the builders of the new Europe -- the Europe of a single currency and trading bloc, of a common security and foreign policy -- seem to have concluded that this Europe has no chance without finally quieting the Balkans.

For now, that goal must be achieved through tens of thousands of peacekeepers and aid workers, who have already created a virtual protectorate in Bosnia, dependent on foreign money and might for its existence. If a less clinging child is to be born in Kosovo, and the tens of thousands of NATO soldiers pouring in there are ever to leave, the world will have to help its people build a functioning state, one where Serbs and Albanians can trust each other with their lives. That would be more difficult with a pauperized, resentful Serbia next door.

In the Balkans, the larger task is now to close the yawning territorial gap between the north European and Greek halves of the European Union, and between most NATO members and the Greeks and Turks. The paths for commerce and tourism along the Danube, between northern and southeastern Europe, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic would be more open and secure.

Apparently, none of this was of great concern when Western Europe failed to end the war in Bosnia in the early 1990's, or when the Clinton Administration later passed up the chance to expand NATO swiftly into the post-Communist Balkans by rejecting Romania in the first wave of NATO enlargement. But now the continuing bloodshed, having drawn NATO into a major military role in the region, seems to have convinced the West to try to close the gap.

That cannot be done without the 10 million Serbs, who are still the most numerous people in the former Yugoslavia, outnumbering all but the Greeks and Romanians on the Balkan peninsula. Geographically, Serbia is at the heart of this region -- its roads, railways and rivers indispensable to any commerce or communication that might finally wear down the hatreds and rivalries that have gnawed at these lands this century.

Serbia is to the Balkans what Germany is to Europe: a country and culture too big to ignore. After World War I, Europe and America considered Germany to have been the main cause of that conflict, and punished Germany by imposing impossible reparations and effectively isolating it from the rest of Europe. The policy was perhaps morally satisfying, even just. One of its unintended results was the rise of Adolf Hitler.

IN the Balkans, leaving Serbian hatreds and the traumas of the past 12 years of Mr. Milosevic's rule to fester could well turn many Serbs even more against the outside world. Mr. Clinton has called on the Serbs to remove Mr. Milosevic but there is no assurance that they will, any more than Iraqis have followed the urgings of Mr. Clinton and his predecessor, George Bush, to rid themselves of Saddam Hussein. And for as long as he remains in power, Mr. Milosevic and his media would still paint Serbs as victims of foreigners and the other peoples of the old Yugoslavia.

The brutal killers who have served the Serbian leader would have little compunction about acting as arms procurers or mobile guerrillas to anyone willing to pay (Iraq is among Serbia's closer allies). Politically, Mr. Milosevic could be driven even further into the arms of the only president who visited him during the Kosovo war, the Stalinist leader of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko.